Improvement Forecast in Shopping Center Leasing

The leasing market for neighborhood and community shopping centers on the Oxnard Plain has bottomed out and should show a slight improvement during the rest of the year, said Reed Henkelman, a vice president of CB Commercial Real Estate Group in Ventura.

“The market has absorbed about three-fourths of almost 1 million square feet of retail space that became available in the past two years, and slightly more than 1 million additional square feet have been proposed for the next two years,” Henkelman said.

The Oxnard Plain includes Ventura, Oxnard and Camarillo.

Henkelman said he expects that the market for shopping centers anchored by major national retailers to be “pretty much saturated” after 1994. Three new centers have been proposed along the Ventura Freeway, he said. These are a factory-outlet center and a Target/Mervyn’s center, both in Camarillo, and a Wal-Mart/Sam’s Club center in Oxnard.

In this year’s first quarter, the overall vacancy rate for shopping centers of more than 50,000 square feet on the Oxnard Plain was 8.5%, Henkelman said. This compared with 8.2% in the last quarter of 1991 and 7.2% in the first quarter of 1991.

By city, Henkelman reported the following vacancy rates during the first quarter of 1991:

* Ventura--4% of total retail square footage.

* Oxnard--10.4% of total retail square footage.

* Camarillo--11.6% of total retail square footage.